Guardians of Middle-Earth Patches Are Cloud Based

Developers are using the system to avoid Sony and Microsoft certification

Cloud delivery

The development team at Monolith Games says that it is using a new cloud-based technique to deliver patches for its newly launched Guardians of Middle-Earth in order to make sure that all balance and gameplay changes are deployed as quickly as possible.

The new system also makes sure that all updates do not need to go through the certification process for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 that Sony and Microsoft enforce, which can slow down releases significantly.

The team is also carefully monitoring the strategies that players come up with in order to make sure that no one combination of characters or power is unbalanced.

Bob Roberts, a producer at Monolith Games working on Guardians of Middle-Earth, tells VG247 that, “The basic idea is that, if they can sink time in and really practice a particular combo – say five guardians that really compliment each other really well , and the perfect item build – that there is always a counter for that.”

“So no matter what the testers figured out to be the best possible strategy that they could think of, and was over-powered for a couple of days, someone else on the team would figure out a counter to it. That strategy would then become dominant for a couple of days, and it cycled around like that whether or not we changed any balance,” he adds.

Roberts believes that the developers need to allow the community the space it needs in order to find new strategies and then evolve them and make the game richer.

Guardians of Middle Earth introduces players to a cast of heroes drawn from the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and then allows them to form a team and conduct battles using the core mechanics of the MOBA genre, with collaboration essential to the success of any team.